Teaching of Constructive Engineering at the Gründerzeit in Vienna

Abstract

The Habsburg monarchy Gründerzeit starts after the bourgeois revolution in 1848 and lasts to the end of the First World War. It restructured the country from an agricultural to a technological state, which has a significant impact on construction in the rapidly growing modern metropolis Vienna. Two types of residential building, the noble tenement house along Ringstrasse and a rental house type for the masses characterize the construction technology in specific. Vienna nowadays still holds the biggest ensemble of Gründerzeit tenement houses worldwide. - Their construction of the early days, which appears to be conservative at first glance, turns out to be extremely progressive in retrospect, in terms of safety and sustainability. Building and chimney care regulations guaranteed exceptional fire safety very early on. Staircases had to be obligatory in stone. The well-considered use of masonry made of burned bricks with plaster or stone facades in historicist style, high-quality wooden casement windows and wooden double doors, and a mix of vault and wooden floor construction characterize the engineering of the founder period residential house. - The Vienna World Exhibition in 1873 already made the building types, construction methods and building technology of the modern metropolis its exhibition object. The building construction portfolio of Riewel and Schmid contained for the first time the consolidated building construction knowledge of 1873. Until 1900, it underwent several modifications and extensions of knowledge, to serve as solid and up-to-date teaching material for the middle level education of master artisans, as well as for the high-quality training of architects and structural engineers at technical colleges and universities. The paper will present materials and the usual construction methods of the Gründerzeit residential building in Vienna. The final building construction portfolio from 1897, which survived at TU Wien, serves as knowledge base for the paper, which will also give some inside into the development of those series of template works.